growing pains
Posted on | June 11, 2008 | 21 Comments
One Scooby Doo bandaid and a glass of wine later, this is what heartache feels like.
He comes home from the day with his Gram and Gramps who indulge his every wish: playground visits, popsicles, escaping from naps, trips to the hardware store, the library, the moon… When he gets here, he’s asleep and the rain has rinsed the heat out of the day. He’s in his car seat when they bring him, in his underpants, hair curling with sweat.
We carry him inside where he sleeps on DH the way he used to before his legs were long and his knees were scraped and his heart belonged only to us. Then he wakes, and all he wants is her, his Gram, who smells like sweet perfume and has soft hugs and buys him cookies whenever they go out.
He starts to cry for her. His eyes get red and puffy and he runs away and hides in corners, sobbing. Inconsolable, he doesn’t want either one of us, only her. Snot runs from his nose in a trail, and we offer peanut butter cookies and milk and he eats them and then starts to cry again; his smile as temporary as the thunderstorm earlier today that brought nickel-sized hail and a tornado warning while I was at school.
DH and I go outside onto the lawn. We check on the baby chicks, their beaks and yellow and sharp and their eyes round and dark. The grass is wet from the rain. We hold hands. Neither of us has any fucking idea what to do with our small boy who is standing in the doorway sobbing, not wanting to be with us but not wanting to be left alone either.
My heart feels like the tangled strings of a marionette; like prongs in a splintered music box; like the quarters that fall under couch cushions and are forgotten. We go back inside, agreeing to ignore him for a while. Surely this has gone on long enough, this wailing, this utter ridiculousness. He’s clutching the phone. “I want to call Gram,” he says each word punctuated with a gasping sob.
I put on Jack Johnson. DH grills chicken. I make potato salad. Bean sobs, clutching the phone.
Finally we cave, after forty five minutes of sobbing. When she answers, her first words are stupid and they make my heart feel like bits of broken glass. “I’ll be right over,” she says. DH intervenes. She’s his mom, so he can say it like it is. Not what we’re looking for here. Just say hi to him, calm him down. So she starts in, planning tomorrow with him: a trip to the café for milk and cookies, returning library books, a bike ride, a trip to the playground.
Smiles flutter on his face like the little blue moths that kept landing on the kids hands and arms at school while we were walking in the tall grass. They’d alight, then stick their tongues out, licking the salt from the kid’s sweaty palms, everyone watching in wonderment. My little boy didn’t want anything to do with me, and now he’s sitting there at the counter, elbows up, talking on the phone like a teenager, his face wide with grins. I can only listen for a while, before I feel like I can’t breathe.
I go to the wine rack, reach for the first bottle, grapple with the cork screw. Except for with dinner sometimes I never drink, but it seems like the only thing that makes any sense: in that it doesn’t at all. The cork breaks, and the sharp tip of the corkscrew gashes across my index finger. When I hold my finger up to my mouth and my blood tastes coppery. I pour a glass and take a sip. He’s still talking to her and her voice is a cloying sing-song of sweetness.. My heart feels like a bit of clay, drying in the sun, a hundred little fissures forming on the surface. Damn. No one told me told me about this. No one warned me that they stop loving only you. That you stop being everything, that a day comes when your kiss no longer makes it better.
I take the red metal colander to the garden with a sharp knife and cut the outer leaves of lettuce heads, all curly and green. Walking across the wet grass to the garden I cry. Then while I’m cutting the salad greens he calls for me, “Mommy, where are you?” and my heart is a trout flip flopping about with a wild helpless kind of love. He’s standing at the top of the garden path waiting for me, and I pick him a wild daisy from among the tall grasses and he grins when I hand it to him. “I love you, Mommy,” he says.
We eat dinner and finally, he’s all mine again. I feed him buttered noodles with peas and carrots and then we sit on stools by the window watching the storm move towards us across the mountain. We count bolts of lightening and he grins, eyes still red, eyelashes tangled. Then the sky changes fast from light to metallic gray. The leaves on the trees are tossed belly side up, like a thousand darting minnows caught between here and the storm tossed sky. Rain chases the wind, and DH goes about shutting windows and nursing his own form of heartache.
Bean wanted neither of us; and while he’s climbing back and forth now between our laps sharing an ice cream sandwich and watching the storm dwindle, his small betrayal still stings like salt in a cut.
So this is watching your kid grow up; becoming someone separate, like one Jupiter’s moons. We fall into each other in a tight embrace and I feel the muscles in DH’s chest bunch against my cheek. He’s holding me the way we used to, like it’s just us again, before Bean, though it’s different of course. Three years, and suddenly he’s clamoring for independence at the threshold of our hearts. All we can do is stand in the doorway watching the storm approach. Then suddenly, rain is pelting our skin.
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21 Responses to “growing pains”
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I am Christina Rosalie
Hello. I'm so happy you've stopped by!
I am a multimedia storyteller, digital strategist, idea starter, stalker of wonder, finder of four leaf clovers, MFA graduate student, and mama of boys. My first book,
will be published by SKIRT! Books in September, 2012.
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June 11th, 2008 @ 7:48 pm
christina, your posts are always gorgeous, honest and juxtapose images with emotions. this post left me speechless, teary-eyed and so, so, so impressed. thank you for sharing.
June 11th, 2008 @ 10:08 pm
I am utterly speechless. So incredibly beautiful. And so true of motherhood.
The circle of influence gradually widens…yet, you will manage through it, I promise.
June 12th, 2008 @ 2:46 am
I think of my mother while reading your words. The way I feel bad about sometimes not calling her for a week, refusing to share moments of my life, especially university studies, as I don’t feel her thoughts on them could be anything more than a distant breeze. The way I felt sad so many times as a child and later, too, after raising my voice, her words always calming and soft, diplomatic, not harsh and loud and full of anger as mine. Heartache, over and over again.
I love you, Mommy.
June 12th, 2008 @ 5:14 am
Damn you write well.
June 12th, 2008 @ 8:05 am
So thoughtful and heartfelt (heart wrenching, more like it), both your post and Johanna’s response. We only know sometimes how to feel like a parent once we’re head deep into it, but then, there’s that other side of us we forget; that we are also someone else’s “Bean.” It hurts when we see glimpses of the inevitable tendencies(i.e., independence) of the human spirit in our little ones.
How you and DH react now to that inevitability in your son will make all the difference in his confidence to reach out to others in a positive and healthy way. Go with the flow. You and DH are the anchor for your little one, now and always. He needs that anchor.
I so wish you could stay home with him, though. This time is so fleeting, so fleeting. It should be you taking him for Popsicles and library outings, even the hardware store. Still, he looks for you at the end of tears and wide grins, wanting to know that he’s okay, everything’s okay, that you’re Okay. He’s only a 3yo after all, not an intentional heart breaker.
June 12th, 2008 @ 10:56 am
My god that was gorgeous, poignant, incredibly honest and soulful. What an amazing and delicate evening, with so much meaning and so much anguish. I do not envy your heartache, but I do envy the way you capture it with such brilliant energy.
June 12th, 2008 @ 10:57 am
My little boy is 11 now and I was home with him for the first 5 years of his life. I went through this when he and his Dad became video game buddies. I’m outside that circle now. But, music and theater are what we share in our circle. There are trade-offs I guess.
You write so beautifully.
June 12th, 2008 @ 12:19 pm
Lord, Christina, hand me my heart back now, will ya, now that you’ve torn it out of my chest and SQUEEZED it so.
June 12th, 2008 @ 1:16 pm
I only WISH my girls would want someone else sometimes! HA! I have the EXACT opposite issues as all they want is ME and it’s exhausting! especially my oldest one. Recently my younger has started really being more and more of daddy’s girl. it doesn’t break my heart at ALL! but one day, when they choose to be with someone else instead of me then I know I will be sooooo heartbroken>
this was so sad, but beautifully written>!
and even though I have not experienced that I can feel your heartbreak.
tara
June 12th, 2008 @ 1:49 pm
I’m speechless. This is beautiful. And what truth!
June 12th, 2008 @ 3:10 pm
Yes, oh yes. I’ve been here (still am to some degree). My eldest (7) is like this with his Grandparents. I used to wonder why it wound me up so much – I resented them. Thought (and still think) them to be over indulgent and unable to say ‘no’ to him. But I suppose what really eats me up, is what you’ve described. Beautifully.
June 12th, 2008 @ 3:35 pm
I feel like we are living parallel lives (without the wine and really cool garden).
My almost-three year old son stays with my in-laws from Monday afternoon until Tuesday night. This is to give us a break since we have a 4 month old too. Every Tuesday night it’s a similar situation with us. CJ sobs when grandma leaves, he doesn’t want to listen to us, he’s really just a little troll. Then Wednesday morning comes and he’s happy to see us. Last night he said he wanted to go to grandma’s house again.
June 12th, 2008 @ 3:46 pm
My experience has been that the hardest part of raising children is letting them go — even when they’ve been (but usually not being) hellions. Cutting the leaves from lettuce heads while you weep is precisely the kind of soul work that can sustain you — if you can keep your wits about you to remember what to do now, and tomorrow, and the next time. Remember, too, that one of the key signs of a well-built soul is the emergence of compassion; so this, also, is true: the larger your soul, the more daisies you’ll need.
June 12th, 2008 @ 8:34 pm
you
need
to
be
published.
June 12th, 2008 @ 11:15 pm
this has the tears rolling down my cheeks. i want to hug you, and bean. and then i want to go get mine out of bed and hug them and never let go because i know that it won’t be long before i am in your shoes. damn this parenting thing sucks. but your words are a treasure christina.
June 12th, 2008 @ 11:33 pm
Thank you for sharing this. I was just swept back through five years to when my daughter was two. MIL was her world and I was the intruder who snatched my little wailing betrayer away every day at 4 o’clock. I had to peel her tiny clutching fingers from round the neck of the woman who held her heart. And every damn day it hurt. Logically, I can tell you that I was blessed by my MIL who watched both my children; no babysitter could love, spoil, protect my babies like their granny, but the Mr. Hyde side of me resented the time they shared. It is hard to be away from our own children to educate someone elses kids.
Amid the hurt and frustration, I encourage you to cling to what you know to be true: you are blessed for having the availability of grandparents, Bean is blessed for having the dedication of his grandparents, and no matter what you are the true keeper of his pitter-patter heart.
By the way, I sit writing this tonight as my 5 and 7 yr olds (who, as it turns out, truely love their momma best) are staying the night at MIL’s house; I get to do a little shopping tomorrow with my mom (whose heart I have broken a time or two).
Again, thank you for sharing such an intimate portion of your life. Your writing is exquisite.
June 13th, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
Such beauty. Just pure beauty.
June 13th, 2008 @ 10:08 pm
You are so amazing. you talented, gifted woman. That you can write this so beautifully, intuit the feeling of his rejection – and it breaks my heart. I don’t want to ever feel this way! And yet already he has special smiles and hugs for his Lovie.
I can so hear it, those little sobs between the words. Oh, the drama!
June 14th, 2008 @ 4:45 pm
What a story. Thank you for sharing.
June 15th, 2008 @ 11:53 am
Beautiful, beautiful writing…as always:) Thank you for sharing your awesome talent with us.
The first major event in his independence. So sweet.
My heart feels like a mosaic of brokenness constantly being glued back together from my children. But when its done the love it holds is more and pure. Like refined gold, going through the fire to be pure. Having choices and still…
June 27th, 2008 @ 7:33 pm
You have a remarkable gift for words. This must be published wherever you are and in Australia. There is so much insight there. It’s not just the gifts she gives him, it must be her lovingkindness as well. We all have to learn to share our kids – then they grow up, choose wives perhaps, but still sometimes write an email or even a posting on the web – ‘thanks Mum and Dad. We had a terrific childhood’.
w.